CBS Evening News

Psst...Wanna Buy A Dirty Bomb?

By Armen Keteyian

October 10, 2006 / 5:34 PM EDT / CBS News

(CBS)

I can't tell how many times I've taken the Long Island Expressway – known as the L.I.E. around N.Y.C. – and never noticed the sign at Exit 68 for the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Today I got an inside look at the sprawling government site as part of my "Loose Nukes" piece for tonight's CBS Evening News. The purpose of my visit was to interview Dr. Ralph James, the man in charge of Brookhaven's high-tech attempt to detect the movement of nuclear materials smuggled into the United States.

As Barb Turner will attest (she helped me pass the class) science was never my strong suit. But I do have a pretty good Geiger counter when it comes to terror, and just in the short time the I-team has been working this story, it's clear the issue of rogue states with a long history of being a major player in the weapons market (can you say North Korea) must be handled on two fronts: As former Senator Sam Nunn, an expert on nuclear proliferation told us, sensitive nuclear material or equipment MUST be secured overseas FIRST because once it gets here it's hard to find and harder to control. "It's the needle in the haystack," Nunn told I-team producer Laura Strickler. "If you can get the haystack – you're much better off."

Dr. James agrees wholeheartedly but he's principally in the business of finding the needle these days. In a 90-minute tour and interview in one of his labs, he calmly and carefully explained the ever-evolving search for more sensitive equipment that can differentiate between gamma rays emitted by the 11 MILLION people every year who undergo some sort of nuclear medical procedure – yes, 11 MILLION – and a dirty bomb packed into the back of a truck.

The biggest challenges, he said, is the range of the current equipment and the unacceptable number of false positive triggered by the vast array of detectors he had laid out during a show-and-tell. Some light enough to hold in your hand; others occupying the lion's share of space, costing 100K or more, too bulky and expensive as yet to make it into mainstream use.

As we were winding down I asked Dr. James this question: "Given the news from North Korea – are we in the race against time to find these dirty bombs, to detect nuclear material in the U.S. and around the world?"

"I think one thing is certain," he said. "If the materials were available and they could deliver them to the U.S., there's a good chance they would. So that really defines where we need to go in developing technology. We need to develop better radiation detectors."

And given my visit to Brookhaven, my sense is there's little doubt they will. Even less doubt they will need to.